Kevin Kelly made me think…
When he said we aren't amazed
I literally looked at the screen and started to shake my head profusely. I was watching in BoCo café (I work here)
eating food. I wanted to point to the
kid whipping out his iPhone 5 and using his parents platinum credit card to pay
for his breakfast via an ipad (I talked about during my last post) and declare
“OMG you Aren’t amazed, are you? Keven’s right you aren’t and you should be!” I
mean come on who am I to judge? Maybe deep down inside he was amazed… buuuut
then again he was probably too dazed by the cloud to really even know or care
or both.
I had to stop watching the
Ted talk and write. I think I’m starting
to slowly figure out how I want to live my life. I used to always be such a hippie. Being a hippy was always smoking weed and
being all earthy, I gave up drugs but yet I still feel like I'm fighting. I was a rebel fighting
for a cause, that cause I’m only now starting to figure out what the hell
exactly means. I always thought I was
supposed to be born in the 60s because they actually had a clear reason why
they revolted against society. There was
this huge counter culture of people who rebelled against society for legit
reasons. They took it too far with the
whole phyco-delic drug thing but I mean they were just testing the boundaries
of what was right and what wasn’t. They
became rebels of this wonderful army fighting for peace, love, and harmony for
all people under this one nation that was founded on the grounds of
Christianity. One nation under God,
something I believe we should have never left behind BUT how in the world would
we have managed to take it with us?
There were these confused people who ended up burning the bible because
the people on the opposite end of the spectrum were even more confused and
manipulated the word of the bible into being a set of rules that turned out to
be impossible for people to uphold, thus making Christianity a disgusting turn
off to anyone with a creative soul that felt as if their individual creativity
and inter most desires and passions were a work of the devil and something to
be ashamed of. The bible was taken so
strictly, rigidly, and so black and white when it was never meant to be that
way. My god would never want people to
turn to drugs and become perma-trips which is what happened to some people of
the 60s BUT EVEN MORE SO he would not want people calling themselves Christians
if they twisted the bible into thinking that woman's rights, the curiosity of
sexuality, and spirituality through yoga and anything “new age” was surely
going to give you a ticket straight to hell….
I think this relates to a
lot of today's problems. Why young kids
are becoming drug addicts and developing drinking problems and all that. There is such a HUGE generation gap between
older people and younger people and so much misunderstanding. We are the technology generation going
through a revolt of our own. The counter-culture
back then (hippies in revolt) looks so damn simple compared to today's
counter-culture. There’s nothing wrong
with technology, it’s a wonderful thing but I feel like my generation is so “stuck
in the cloud” that it might be hurting us more than benefiting us. We know more about about our iPhone and who Siri is than we know about own selves.
I just couldn't believe it when Kevin stated that "First, that basically what this machine is doing is embodying. We're giving it a body. And that's what we're going to do in the next 5,000 days -- we're going to give this machine a body. And the second thing is, we're going to restructure its architecture. And thirdly, we're going to become completely codependent upon it." He went on to explain that soon we won't even have to remember our own phone numbers, we can just google it. So does this mean the extinction of human memory is soon to come? I mean I don't know...
BASICALLY YOUNG PEOPLE NEED
MORE SPIRITUALITY (which is a journey, by no means am I preaching) AND TO PLAY
IN THE DIRT...
I'll be back later to edit this, I understand it is a bit of a rant and should be a bit more organized and factual :)
Hi Leah,
ReplyDeleteThis got you pretty fired up, huh? I feel you with the whole kids with iPhones glued to their hands buying things with their parents credit card thing. I worked at a burrito shop up until a few years ago, and we would say that they were using their "Kidz Kard".
This guy Kevin Kelley was forcing the technology-dependence issue pretty hard, and seems to have gotten other people pretty fired up, as well.
Seems like a sensitive subject, huh? I'm just as squeamish about technological over dependency as the next online student, but let me elaborate.
I spent my teen years as a mowhawked and studded punk. Technology was not cool. Technology was like your parents or President Bush. Definitely not cool. I played in enough bands that sang enough songs about killing your tv to remember, today, that loving your iPhone is about as cool as voting Republican. Or voting at all, for that matter.
But it's ok. I've learned a few things since I stopped dying my hair green and put the safety pins away. One of which, is that regardless of how you feel about technology, it can be pretty useful if you live in the 21st century. I don't think anyone will argue that.
That's what we do as humans. We adapt and thrive. Stevie Jobs thinking up the first iPhone and the caveman who realized a round rock would roll were pretty much doing the same thing. They found new technology and used it to make their lives easier.
The point Kelly made that stuck out the most to me, and that might give you some perspective, is that dependence on today's technology is no different than depending on the alphabet to communicate. It may not seem like it today, but back in the second millennium bc, the alphabet was blowing minds. Imagine being able to put ideas and histories and stories on paper or in stone for the first time. Do you think there were second millennium bc punks going around saying that using the alphabet was selling out and it was only cool to grunt and draw pictures on caves?
Just like today, I'm sure there were kids back then who wouldn't listen to their parents or make eye contact with anyone because they were too busy writing with their new alphabet, but civilization seems to have done pretty well because of it.
It's our choice. I think we'll run into problems if our brains don't grow along with technology. Computers may outgrow us in their capacity to process information, but they will never have a soul.
Thanks for the insight! It's actually a really good point you make, saying that computers will never have a soul. They are capable of creativity but can not create themselves. I guess it's like the whole left/right brain thing. Computers are solely left brained and human beings will always have the whole brain. :)
Delete